Chief Minister’s expeditious steps solve tricky problems
No day passes in Karnataka without the engineering colleges hitting the front page news headlines!Such is the top priority for engineering education in the state.Bangalore is setting the agenda for top quality engineering graduates.
The IT companies are now desparately in search of high quality talent.Infosys,as the news has it,is getting nearly 1.5 lakh applicants.It interviews 50,000 candidates.Finally selects 15,000! Is this good news or bad news?It is plainly bad news for educators.Education planners.Education promoptors and finally the unfortunate many who dont make it at the company gates!
It is bad planning all the way.Why you turn out so many graduates?Why the graduates have to become so desparate if the IT companies are in search of such number?And why the Infosys should have the luxury of so elaborate an interview,like any government employment exchange would do(manually,with so mmuch unimaginative old bureaucratic style,causing and giving so much of mental pain for parents and students) and then finally select 15,000! This clearly a waste of time,enegery and mental peace! Can’t we,the society,the politicians, educators,the experts and finally the education promotors(who also have a high commercial,undeserving exploitative mind),all come out with something more open,transparent,more civilized and less expensive education and employment paradigm.
Certainly,great achievers like Mr.Narayanamurthy and Azim Premji and others must come out with a more elegant education and recruitment model.Cant they all reflect on the larger issues of how to enhance the quality parameters at the very early stage?They can,given the current high level of wastage in the entire engineering education and placement chain. Now,there is a heavy shortage of engineering talents and trained skills.For that matter,we see there is such shortage of trained manpowerin almost all sectors of industry and services.More so in some sectors like agriculture too. This is not theplace to go into the historical factors.Given the current competitive scenario,there are already some positive developments.There is the campus-links programmes initiatives by the big IT companies,there are also new innovations to get two batches of students every year by staggering the entry and exit timings in the campuses.In TN,there are some initiatives to establish the collaborative co-operation on campuses so that the inustry needs are planned well in advance and also the collages get the assurance their products would be well-absorbed into establkished major IT co.s.This type of advanced planning is needed if the entire engineering education chain,from the top quality ones to the not so good ones(there is no way you can run away from the reality of all sorts of good,bad and plainly mercenary self-financing education promotors!) are brought into some rationale of quality improvement programmes.
The AITEC had sanctioned in the past so many mushrooming of colleges(we know that was done under some bad state politicians!)and at any rate the AITEC had now taken corrective steps.It reduced the number of intake,it banned some colleges to run some pretentious IT courses and also imposed time-bound corrective steps. There are also some good leaders to do these corrective steps.Dr.Natarajan,the past chairman of AITEC and Dr. Mouna Gurusamy, the former Vice Chancellor of Anna University did lots of”Thankless”jobs to introdeuce some sanity in technical education.
In Karnataka we have the indefatigable VTU VC K.Balaveera Reddy who had really innovated many steps to correct the deficieinces in quality educationand counselling the candidates for admissions to colleges. Taking the broad view,India has to move forward,stand up to competitions,from China and the USA and also we must get the numbers to meet the present and future needs.
Also,we see that the IT,ITes,BPO potential to trigger the economic growth and wealth creation and the employment generation.For every employed boy or a girl in these sector and also for all those now employed in the subsidiary services that cater to the IT industry demands,the multiplier trigger is truly awesome!